I have found a distinct pattern in OC ability and brand. Asus,MSI, and Sapphire giving better OC's in general.

Overclocking is about the experience.

True, performance gains is not much (3FPS in nothing), except you get this performance at FPS level where it matters (i.e. have 21FPS than 18 - the game can somehow be playable or at least not nerve-breaking)

I love over clocking. Even if the performance jump isn't stunning, it's fun.

I have my Phenom 955 at 3.8GHz @ 1.375V totally stable and idling at 23 degrees with an NH-D14 on it.

My Sapphire 6850 is at 910MHz core and 4600MHz memory, which takes it close to the 6870.

Would I really appreciate overclocking for 15% more performance if my game is running under 60 FPS? Probably not) I get more performance gained by turning down game settings in such a case.

If a card needs to be overclocked for better game performance, I just buy a newer faster card.

I've also learned a huge amount about computers through overclocking and getting every bit of performance out of my computer. It has taught me more than any book could have.

True dat.
However, as a user of both AMD and Nvidia I'd add EVGA and Palit (along with PowerColor in non-reference SKU's) to those brands. The other end of the spectrum seems to include Diamond, VisionTek, Club 3D, PNY and Leadtek...luckily the slap-a-high-clock-BIOS-onto-the-damn-thing-and-cross-your-fingers approach pioneered by BFG seems to have died out with the brand.

oveclocking means more refresh...
and that give more noise...

i like silence !

and who care about 4fps more when you eyes just can see 25 in a minute !!!

overcloking was fun 10 years ago... when it was illegal ^^

yup, You forgot POV...LOL
I think its a comBINation of pick of the bins, and then they by default put beefed up VRM's (sub Volterra for CHL and so forth)
I remember when Vision Tek was the #1, how times have changed.

The binning is likely a by-product of the allotment of GPU's each company get sent. Asus, Gigabyte and MSI (AMD+Nvidia),Sapphire, EVGA and Palit (vendor specific) hold the largest marketshares*, thus have a larger pool to bin from. This probably shows up best when you look at the OC percentages of their top bins (DCII, TFIII, SOC, Toxic, Classified, Sonic Platinum).

Theoretically, the first launch reference cards should follow the standard distribution curve of overclockability, since they are all the same card, off the same production line (PC Partner or Foxconn), but I wouldn't be overly surprised if the stronger AIB's warrant some pre-distribution binning.

*Galaxy being the odd one out. They don't seem overly interested in binning for high clocks, and even when they do, have a habit of pricing their top bins (KFA2 Anarchy for example) the same as reference cards. OK cards, but the short warranty is a killer in the resell market.

I enjoy overclocking for either the fun of it or to just squeeze out some more performance in demanding games. I really haven't pushed my current Radeon 6850 that much as I've been satisfied with its performance, and my small bumps outside benchmarks isn't really noticeable. However my previous card a Radeon 4770 I pushed quite a lot, and in return saw around a 20% boost which made quite the difference in some games like Bad Company 2.

S!

I keep my stuff stock. At the moment Intel i5 2500K bundled with AMD 7970HD are more than enough for any games I play at 1920x1080 resolution. Years back did overclock some CPU's but stability issues vs actual gains were again not worth it.

Here's what overclocked 7970 can do:


This is my own little test i did a while ago

^^ ok the image didn't show up show here's the link:
http://img141.imageshack.us/img141/9239/tuloksetassault.png

Game tested: Crysis, 2560x1600p, 4xAA, Maximum Settings

I learned my lesson buying my 295's from MSI. I now only buy evga, great company, decent support. nuff said. My second 580 wouldn't oc as well as the first one I purchased. I rma'd it no problem, second one is kicking hard just like its counterpart. 1.150 volts, 1ghz

I'll second that. My GTX 580's are EVGA also. Very rare to to see a company put the time and effort into customer service and the enthusiast userbase that EVGA do. Many a time I've had what amounts to realtime troubleshooting help from Jacob and Co on their forums. Having the company step up to the plate on custom BIOS's and workarounds when XFX, BFG, and Nvidia themselves showed little interest with (noteably Nvidia chipset mobo's) products is probably why EVGA have both a high profile amongst consumers, and tend to keep those customers going forward.
BTW: Nice clock...the benefit of full cover blocks!

i'm adding my third this month, between valentines day and my anniversary I'm just barely making room, but ordering my third full cover block along with my card and I'm going to try to not look back.

Yes, of course, I do overclock! My i5-2500k is now 4,7Ghz and my Gigabyte gtx460 1Gb oc runs now 870/3900 gpu/mem and I see so much free performance over stock speeds!! Many games ain't very playable at high or veryhigh/ultra setting with gtx460 on stock, but when you unleash the oc monster, the situation becames very different!

And now on winter, when its freezing cold in outside (-15C / 5F), I really can push things to the limits! Cool greetings from Finland!

The question was whether to OC graphics cards, and whether factory OC's were a good value - I think tech spot got it right in this article, when they said, in some situations yes, in others no. There are pros and cons for sure - it's not all pros, and it's not all cons. half of you take a hard line one way or the other - and all this does is reveal your maturity or lack thereof in the enthusiast computing space..... just experiment, learn, enjoy - and for future reference - if you have nothing of value to say - say nothing at all..... : )

I have the asus nvidia geforce engtx 550 Ti

Asus offers a modified driver and an application called "smart doctor" At first it was wonderful. The smart doctor sets it to 910 Mhz by default. I can easily slide it to 1.1 Ghz

But nvidia is not asus and asus is not nvidia.

Asus update hardware detection doesn't do video cards.

The ASUS page about the geforce 550 Ti lists driver downloads that refuse to install because they are for a different video card. Video cards seem not ASUS core business. They might know how to make wonderful things, the service level is way below that of say mobo's.

I cant imagine why it should be acceptable not to list their own hardware I just bought? I actually thought it would make things easier by buying from the same vendor.

However you want to twist that argument, ASUS doesn't care about video the way nvidia does.

I'm left wondering, is there even a working asus driver update for this card? Did they replace the download with the wrong one or did they list the wrong driver while there was non?

Nivdia was quick to patch bugs in their drivers (that showed up inside high end games)

ASUS tells me nothing about those "official" drivers.

I can install them (obviously) but then they replace the ASUS enhanced driver that is required for over clocking.

In stead of clicking 1 "hardware detect" and 2 "update driver" I have to read patch notes now.

If a few more bugs are found in the future in either this or some other nvidia/asus video card people will have to read those patch notes and make intelligent decisions about their implications.

I'm not paying premium tariff for linuxing assignments. I expect manufacturers to make minimal effort to do such things for me. Having each end user do this individually is a horrendous waste of time.

At the moment I seem to have the nvidia driver installed with the asus enhanced driver on top. I'm making the wild assumption this is a valid configuration. This way over clocking works but I'm afraid to press the nvidia buttons.

Some of the ingame bugs did vanish. I might have "accidentally" done the right thing here. It certainly doesn't feel that way.

Overclocking might have benefits besides from making a lot of noise. 910 to 1100 Mhz isn't bad. I do feel like I bought a video card from a company that makes motherboards and monitors.

At the time that sounded close enough.

Now I'm thinking 'no cigar'.

I still overclock my processor, my video card not so much as proven here will only provide a couple FPS increase and does not justify the wear on the hardware especially given the price of high end video cards.

Anyone who says overclocking is stupid is just flat out ignorant. It can provide a pretty huge performance jump and given people like me who do this as a hobby so it's fun for us.